In recent weeks, we've been focusing a lot on the difficulty that David Barton has accurately reporting on contemporary issues that are easily verifiable and we have been doing so because it demonstrates his utter unreliability, especially as it pertains to the niche he has carved out as the Religious Right's favorite historian.
After all, if Barton cannot even tell the truth about things that happened just last year that can be verified with a quick Google search, why should anyone believe anything he has to say about the Founding Era, especially when many of his claims are based on rare documents that very few have ever seen?
On today's episode of "WallBuilders Live," Barton and co-host Rick Green were discussing the Religious Right's on-going crusade against openly gay Houston Mayor Annise Parker. During the discussion, Barton lamented that out of some five million people in Houston, nobody was willing to step up to offer a serious challenge to Parker during the last election and that a firefighter who did run against her came within 800 votes of defeating her despite only spending $50,000:
Five million people in Houston and she ran and was elected mayor two years ago. At that time, a whole bunch of churches and pastors got together and said this is unacceptable, not in Houston, not where we've got this kind of vote and so they started recruiting two years ago to get a candidate to take her out, because that was the problem they had two years ago, just not a good candidate. So they worked for two years and they come to this year and still nobody is willing to step up. So a fireman stepped up ... I think the fireman spent like fifty thousand dollars and he came within eight hundred votes of beating her.
The fireman that Barton cites was Fernando Herrera and he was actually just one of five opponents that Parker faced in her last election ... and he came in third ... and Parker received over 42,000 more votes than he did:
Houston Mayor Annise Parker won a second term Tuesday, but she faced fierce competition from five opponents.
Parker was challenged by Kevin Simms, Amanda Ulman, Dave Wilson, deputy fire chief Fernando Herrera and Jack O'Connor.
Parker received 58,939 of 115,881 votes. O'Connor had 17,153 votes, Herrera had 16,646, Wilson was fourth with 13,589 votes, Simms had 7,733 and Ullman had 1,821 votes.
It is honestly getting to the point where we now have to check nearly every factual assertion that Barton makes because so many of them turn out to be fundamentally false.
